Just curious: How many players solve puzzles all by themselves?

Well, I really like to do quests and of course puzzles.

I usually try them by my own. I remember Adventure games in the 80's I needed days and weeks to solve quests and puzzles
It was really great to find out. But it was also frustrating not to know, what the programmer thought how to solve something ...
There were infocom adventures I never finished, because of that, even I liked to play them, like lurking horror

Ok, today is another time, and when I really get stuck I search on the forum.

Unfortunately, to search on the forum faster as I did it in past was a result of the problem, that we often didn't knew if the quest/puzzle was bugged or not ...

I really would like to go in a complete Episode (3, 4, 5?) knowing, there aren't bugs

But as I found it, I used Rinaldi's thread to find out, in which scenes we could do something.
I travelled around, watching the "small stories" inside scenes, we can find around the whole game.

For example a short one:
In Etceter, near the Elven Camp you can find a letter in a small crevice and also a few books.

Spoiler: The letter and a few books ...

DAY 229
The Grand Experiment is failing.

I can't control them. They go where they
will--or according to the will of someone
else, someone who isn't me--and that's
northeast. Always northeast.
I must ignore the interlopers and make
do with the horde that I have.

I will bring all the test subjects to
Etceter. And no one will laugh. And she
will love me.
-----------------------------------------------------
Inside this little "cave" are
Cave Fables II
The Grim Sister's Anthology III
The Oak and the Reed
The Sorcerer's Daughte Chapter I

No quest, no puzzle, but a part of the experience:
"hey, I found another small story inside this scene ... often an unsolved story we can think and speculate about what happened ..."

There is really huge interesting stuff around this world - and thank god, there are people, like Rinaldi, finding, solving and providing this to others

I really appreaciate it to know, if I get stucked somewhere, I can watch a forum thread
May be 10% - 20% (well, in case of bugs maybe 50%) of my time.

I assume, when the quest system rework is done in a good way, more players will enjoy questing

 

i love puzzles and am usually pretty good at them. those i haven't gotten on my own i've often discussed with rinaldi. ...but that one stumped me too, not just because i usually have shadows off but because i forgot novia is in the southern hemisphere and so the sun swings through the sky to the NORTH.

 

If the game doesn't provide the information then, as far as I'm concerned, that information doesn't exist.

 

I'd say we solve 3/4. Spoilers on the other 1/4, particularly if we're in a hurry, like needing to get the 3 day buff before a tournament.

I like most of them. There are a few that have no clues as to what's going on, those irritate me.

 

Yeah it just depends on the quest puzzle. If stuff gets too difficult and starts falling into the realm of math enthusiasts & cryptology, meh... I'll just use spoilers. Some things like that drive me crazy. Im sure some out there enjoy those. Game like "The Secret World" where the planet's cryptologists have to brainstorm to figure out stuff is just way beyond me and my interests to be honest. It is fun reading about how they solved some of the difficult ones though... well... beyond the math that is.

 

Zelda Breath of the Wild had puzzles that were expertly crafted and solvable without help or tedious, obtuse, time wasting solutions.

SOTA, does not.

I get help in SOTA, to avoid anger at SOTA. I love SOTA but the current quests are not a positive for the game.

 

I will spend an hour or more trying to solve them myself. However, I have found that in SOTA unless you are very familiar with the mythos in the game, solving the puzzles to be terribly hard overall.

Like most game puzzles are generic, the only zone in SOTA which seems to be generic puzzles IMHO is Boreas. So I was able to solve most of those.

 

There are two specific puzzles that stick in my mind, both of which I spent several hours running around the zone trying to figure them out only to discover later that it was bugged / broken / not implemented fully.

Spoilers all the way since then.

 

I love solving puzzles! Sometimes I get more enjoyment out of solving them than I do getting a reward at the end.

Like Rinaldi, I always try to do them on QA server to make sure they work properly before they go to live.

I always try to do them myself first, but I often get stuck and seek help from some friends (ie. Rinaldi) but I won't go to the spoilers unless I'm absolutely completely stumped. Even then though, I am pretty close to the solution... just a little off. Like I might have done some things in the wrong order or mixed up 2 objects, etc.

My biggest gripe is the fact that there are several "incomplete" puzzles/quests that may not get finished now since those who created or were working on them are no longer employed by Portalarium.

 

I haven't come across any puzzles in shroud yet, but in any games my relationship with puzzles is pretty simple. If puzzle-solving is a continuous progression I will try and solve it myself. Occasionally, if I get stuck, I have no issue hunting for a spoiler.

If puzzle-solving forces repeat-restarts, I will immediately go for an entire walk-through. This is the case where a puzzle might have steps 1-20, and on any step you immediately have to go back to step 1 (or any other step you've already completed successfully). I find that type of gameplay beyond frustrating, and will avoid it by any means.

 

I usually figure them out alone most the time , but drag others back to them every time I do them again so they can learn and get the rewards. There are some though that I group with just to make things smoother.

 

I brute forced Oracle Colossus and blood River outskirts, then took a screen shot of the solution. If there were hints on these, they were not helpful in consideration of the time required to permute the 2^8 or whatever solution space.

For the boreas riddles, I googled them. Sorry but I'm running around following blue sparkly pieces of paper for hours, not in the mood for hours of pondering about generic riddles unrelated to sota entirely.

None of the puzzles have seemed fun or rewarding enough to devote thought to.

 

I do everything following Mac's videos

 

The puzzle i solve is finding the post containing the solution

 

Good question Kara!

I suck at all puzzles. My son bought me Portal 2 and I lasted 5 minutes.

I have fun other ways. Total spoilers for me.

 

I love to try to solve the puzzles on my own, but that being said not all puzzles can be solved if you don't understand "some intent"

So I find when I get stuck it is nice to find some helpful hints around.

 

I differentiate between quests and storylines and puzzles - I like to try do the storyline stuff, and the side quests given by npcs, purely by following the paths they indicate and picking up the information on the way, which makes the unclear or badly structured ones intensely frustrating to the point where I stop doing any of those for a while. I play to have fun, not to get annoyed by the limitations of 'AI' (horrible term, it's certainly artificial but has way less 'intelligence' than most of my house pets have ever had) or having to play 'guess the right keyword' with npcs.

The puzzle stuff, though ... honestly, life and playing time is too short for me to spend the amounts needed to check out the possible theoretical solutions to many of them. A few I have found simply not possible at the adventurer level where I ran into them, since they need you to stand around checking and comparing info and/or work around a pretty huge map - can't do that well if I'm also struggling to keep my character alive... and when I have got way past the level needed to survive, the experience becomes faintly absurd, I stand there reading a symbol on a stone or deciphering some scrawled comments while the creatures around mass-suicide by rushing at me (even where there's a damn huge ring of fire around my mage) and falling dead in heaps. (AI at it's 'best' again....).

I'd like to do more of the puzzles and quests - but I'd far prefer a world that I feel immersed in because it's believable and consistent, and where the experience of doing the puzzles and stories flows from and with that. I've not yet found a computer game where that is true (though I have played in and run dozens of face-to-face rpg games where it's been done really well), and SotA isn't the breakthrough one, so people who explain stuff in forums and websites are an important piece of me enjoying my play time. I'm convinced that for me to find these type of things more fun, it needs a DM with imagination to run them and respond to how the players are understanding things - computers simply are not anywhere near good enough for it.